Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 61

Poem 61

When a country obtains great power,

it becomes like the sea:

all streams run downward into it.

The more powerful it grows,

the greater the need for humility.

Humility means trusting the Tao,

thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:

When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.

Having realized it, he admits it.

Having admitted it, he corrects it.

He considers those who point out his faults

as his most benevolent teachers.

He thinks of his enemy

as the shadow that he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,

if it nourishes its own people

and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,

it will be a light to all nations in the world.

Commentary

As a frequent traveller I am well used to having my identity checked at passport control or immigration counters as one enters various countries.  In these days of growing terrorist problems worldwide, our identity, and proof of it, was never more important.  Also, if we are users of the Internet, as most of us are now, we also realise that identity theft is a singularly common crime, so must must protect ourselves against that as much as we possibly can.

The beautiful Synogogue in Prague, February, 2016

It seems to me as a Special Needs Teacher and a part-time psychotherapist ans counsellor in a secondary school that one of the most sacred things that I do is to help any individual pupil come to acceptance of his identity (I hasten to add that I teach in an all-boys school, hence my use of male possessive adjective here), to come to realise that the fostering and development of one's own self is the most precious task each of us is charged with as a person. Therefore, coming to an awareness of our real identity is very important for every one of us.

In Ireland, we are celebrating the centenary of the beginnings of our young nation in the Easter Rising/Insurrection of 1916.  There have been many books, journals, magazines and commemorative pamphlets, running into hundreds at this stage, dedicated to this centenary celebrati0n - indeed, our own school has produced two such pamphlets.  To state this in other terms, one could truthfully say that our young nation is engaged in the task of coming to terms with its own identity.  Who are we as a young Irish nation? Where stands the vision of those men who first proclaimed the Irish Republic?  Has their vision of true equality for all "the children of the nation" been actually achieved?  We are, then, at present dealing with this and other questions in our commemorative ceremonies, in the many learned commentaries given, in the books written, in all the various media outlets - written, broadcast and digital - and such activity has been a rewarding exercise for us as a nation as individuals.

Artist at work, Firenze, summer 2002

Our Taoist poem speaks about power and about powerful nations.  Ireland is most certainly not a powerful nation, and yet she has power over her own people, can represent them internationally at the EU and at UN fora.  Power in the hands of evil men can lead to much destruction both of people, animals, the goods of the earth and the work of human hands as we have witnessed in the twentieth century.  Matthew White reports in his Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, 2010 that the number of deaths by war and oppression during that period amounted to some 203 million human beings.  One wonders as to what the destruction of animals (mainly horses) and property amounted to - a figure I should prefer not to know as I'm sure it would be mind-bogglingly huge.  As the English Catholic politician and historian Lord Acton famously observed: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."  The statistics quoted confirm that statement.  Power corrupts individuals because of their selfish and worldly-driven and ambitious egos, and it is no wonder then how much more  power actually corrupts whole nations.  The second part of his famous quotation most definitely can be related to such men as Hitler and Stalin and the many hundreds of other despots the world has known since the beginnings of civilization.

Lord Acton, 1834 - 1902

Power, our Taoist poet recommends must always be accompanied by the virtue of humility if it is not to fulfill Lord Acton's famous statement about power quoted in the previous paragraph. Humilty has always been widely viewed as a central virtue in many religions and spiritualities deriving therefrom, and indeed in many philosophic traditions.  It has also often been counterpointed or contrasted with such vices as narcissism, "hubris" and other forms of pride. Humility, needless to say, is related to the adjective "humilis" that can be translated as humble and it is a virtue that became very much abused in Roman Catholic circles over the years where novices in religious orders, and women in particular were called upon to be self-abnegating to such an extent that they might have had a far too low opinion of themselves, perhaps even a low level of self-esteem and consequently very little apreciation for their real selves. However, the Latin word "humilitas" also has a link with the word "humus" which means "earth" or "clay." Hence humility, which obviously entails a certain level of ability to put the ego in its rightful place, also encompasses a sense of being "grounded" and "earthed."  It is this sense of the word that I feel the Taoist poet has in mind in the above quoted lines.

Being grounded and earthed means being able to admit that one does not have all the answers; that the ego has to take its place along with the heart, empathy and compassion as just one motivating factor in our lives; that there is no one right way to live life or any one simple answer to complex problems and that truth is rarely pure and never simple (Oscar Wilde); that everyone makes mistakes and that the admission of them is truly ennobling of the humble person who is always willing to learn.

Individuals as well as nations, then, are called upon by our Taoist poet to be humble, to be earthed, to be grounded, that is to be centered in the Tao.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 10

Can you coax your mind from its wandering

and keep to the original oneness?

Can you let your body become

supple as a newborn child's?

Can you cleanse your inner vision

until you see nothing but light?

Can you love people and lead them

without imposing your will?

Can you deal with the most vital matters

by letting events take their course?

Can you step back from your own mind

and thus understand all things?

Giving birth and nourishing,

having without possessing,

acting with no expectations,

leading and not trying to control:

This is the supreme virtue.

Commentary/Reflections

One of the central problems experienced by the neophyte meditator is that of all the mental distractions that race through the human mind when one attempts to still it.  This is what the poet means above by his term "the wandering mind." In that field of thought called philosophy of mind, there is an interesting question: Do our thoughts think us or do we think our thoughts?  That question never really engaged me early in my life even though I had heard it discussed in that area of philosophy concerned with the nature of the mind. However, it did hit me very strongly and existentially when I had a major breakdown, or indeed a break-through really, at the age of forty - that is, at the time of the typical midlife crisis brought to a point where Yeats says, "the centre cannot hold."  It was then that I experienced my mind being literally hijacked by my thoughts.  The centre could not hold whatsoever: the hub of control had totally disintegrated and the spokes of identity had shattered and scattered into chaos.  Thoughts ran riot in my mind and there was no controlling them.  The nerve-centre of my identity, or if you like, the core of my self had undergone a meltdown.  

Good mental health essentially means that the person is on the way to establishing an identity that is individuated (Jung), integrated (Storr) or actualized (Maslow et al).  In other words the person is as fully their real or true self as is possible: metaphorically we are a series of spokes (character qualities and traits) centred around a hub called the "Real Self" rotating on a unique path. None of us probably ever reaches the acme point in that process. Spiritually, the parallel term in Eastern philosophy would be "the enlightened mind."  The poem above is as deep as can be and has many layers of meaning as the language struggles to express the spiritual quest of life. Quieting or stilling the mind is a wonderful metaphor for getting under the chaos that our unstilled mind can be.  Spiritual writers speak about the task of achieving a Still Point below that agitated surface of existence.  In the above poem, this task is expressed in the words "original oneness."  Each couplet is another way of expressing the search for this elusive Still Point.

If a true pilgrim of the way or a faithful disciple of enlightenment achieves a position of leadership s/he will be able to "love people and lead them without imposing their will."  In other words, their ego will be firmly under control and integrated into their personality. They will have no need for petty jealousies, for "getting their pound of flesh," for settling old scores, for one-up-man-ship of any kind or for any sort of micro-management.  They will be visionary leaders able to bring their staff with them while allowing everyone the freedom to grow and to succeed on their own terms without interference.  Stepping back and not wishing to control things is central to good spiritual and indeed psychological development. We all learn quite quickly that the only people we can change are ourselves, never ever anyone else.  Some of us only learn that lesson painfully and the ego-ridden person makes that mistake all too often. And so, in light of these comments, the following lines from the above poem are worth repeating and reflecting on here:

Can you deal with the most vital matters

by letting events take their course?

Can you step back from your own mind

and thus understand all things?

Another way of saying this is that the person further on the road to enlightenment is getting ever more detached from the non-essential things of life; is getting nearer to that elusive Still Point of being; that primordial state of being our Taoist poem calls "the original oneness."

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 5

Poem 5

The Tao doesn't take sides;

it gives birth to both good and evil.

The Master doesn't take sides;

She welcomes both saints and sinners.

The Tao is like a bellows:

it is empty yet infinitely capable.

The more you use it, the more it produces;

the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

Hold on to the centre.

Commentary

Our systems of justice and indeed our systems of government in the West are adversarial and taking sides comes so naturally to us.  Some few minutes ago I listened to politicians from both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland arguing as to whether the IRA had really "left the stage" or not in that little corner of life on this wonderful, if at times so wounded, planet, often "knee-high in blood" because of one conflict or another.  One could not but indulge in a fleeting moment of despair as one remembered all the wanton bloodshed of some thirty years of Troubles that bedevilled this little island in my own lifetime.  And so when one reads that the Tao does not take sides, one is brought into a spiritual world of promise and of hope, of aspiration and inspiration, and one could, in times of desperation, entertain another fleeting thought as to how unrealistic our spiritual desires may be.

And yet, we all entertain the hopes of a better life, of justice and peace being possible if we really get our act together as human beings.  We write much about these ideals and many brave numbers of us have given their lives for the dream of peace which is, in fact, the work of justice.  And so we have many volunteers who give the sweat of their brow and often their very life's blood for the ideals of the betterment of other human beings. Indeed, some of our number are even willing to spend our energy and indeed our lives for the betterment of planet earth and its very fauna and flora.  Again, spiritually this is understandable as spirituality may be defined as the inherent native desire within every human being to engage in a tripartite connection, i.e., to connect with (i) the self, (ii) others and (iii) the very source of life, some of us dare call God.  In embracing this spiritual desire to connect, one realises that one is but an insignificant, but very conscious, speck with infinite desires and hopes among some 7.5 billion other such conscious specks with equally infinite desires to know and to connect. 

And so our spiritual desire to connect pushes us to what the Tao calls a position of "not taking sides."  This spiritual stance is no easy one to achieve and only some of us will attain that.  Indeed, we all know how hard it is to get rid of our native prejudices which obviously prevent the achievement of such a spiritual state.  However, many of us realise that the attainment of that state of consciousness is the ideal.  Another way of putting this, I suppose, would be to say that such a state of consciousness is the state of enlightenment or even sainthood.

Once again the Tao welcomes both "saints and sinners," but unlike the Bible of the Abrahamic religions, it does not call for repentance, though one assumes that there is an unwritten call to right action assumed by the text.

Once again, like all good poetry, these lines are replete with images and in the second stanza of this poem, the author uses the image of the bellows to represent how the Tao works in the world in an invisible but very capable way.  In this sense it fans the fires of life, inspiration, exhortation and aspiration in all of our lives.

Yet again, the poem warns us that all our talking and writing about the Tau is often so much hot air as really it is only something we can apprehend and appreciate by the route of meditation in action and contemplation of human experience.  Language once again is seen as such a poor tool to express the mystery.

Finally, a lot of spiritual practices emphasise the fact that it is important for the meditator to centre themselves and to find and hold onto that centre.  In short, the Tao may be found by centering ourselves.  To misquote our national poet, William Butler Yeats, it is only when we learn to meditate that we will find that the "centre will hold."

Namaste, friends.

Journal of a Soul 46

The Validity of our Experience 1

John Keats by William Hilton

In my last post I mentioned that I have always been captivated by John Keats's remark that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses."   This was essentially the philosophy of the Romantic Movement in English literature, a philosophy espoused by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, of course, John Keats.  It was simply no good thinking something, they argued, one had to feel it as well.  Of course, the Romantic Movement was very much a reaction to the extreme rationalism spawned by the Enlightenment. 

Thoughts are just that, thoughts, while human experience is something more.  Here we come to the "something more" that we humans experience ourselves as being.  What that "more" might be is the subject of much debate, both oral and written.  I have already mentioned that there are those who subscribe to the thesis that we humans are somewhat "less." That "less" is more easily defined as it sets limits to human possibility in a way - what I am referring to here is the whole thrust to the delimiting of humanity by reducing the human phenomenon to mere rationality, or even to matter (materialism) in some extreme cases.

We are a thinking, feeling, intuiting, believing and behaving unity.  To reduce that dynamic unity that we are to any one of its constituent parts is to do gross injustice to the mystery of the complexity of the human entity.  Over the years one understanding of the human brain, from which the human mind springs, is the three-layered model, or what scholars call the Triune Brain. * In the most fundamental of terms, and I realize that I am running the risk of over-simplifying things here, the first first layer of brain to emerge developmentally over millions of years of evolution was that of the reptile brain from which all our basic instincts and drives spring, that section of the brain that would parallel or correspond to the id of Freud's structural model of the psyche.  Next to emerge in that history of evolution was the central layer or mammalian brain where all our emotions and feelings live.  Then, over the millions of years of further evolution the cortical brain emerged literally to cap the entire brain with its fissures and folds that increase its surface area - the central processor of our thoughts as it were - so that it can be contained within the cranium, the bone helmet that protects the whole organ.

The More rather than the Less

A recent wintery skyline over Howth, County Dublin

It is the more rather than the less that we humans essentially are that fascinates this writer, and whether we can explain and explicate its (that is, the more) workings as I have attempted above is really irrelevant in a sense.  Why? Well, every human being is an expert insofar as he or she has their own personal experiences that are really rich.  Such experiences when shared within the community of all human experiences are thereby validated or even invalidated,  It is in this sharing that reality as we know and understand it emerges as something co-validated by all humans. This is important because in this way all abnormalities are consigned to the periphery.

The Turn to Experience in Psychotherapy 

These days we are inundated with the plethora of therapies that are available to modern well-off human beings to help them in their self-development.  In these therapies their experiences are validated, listened to and affirmed.  Prior to the development of such therapies various cultures with their specific traditions offered religions, rites of passage, stories, music, dance, drama and so on as vehicles of such healing. 

In all of the panorama of human existence since its emergence, it is surely the validation of human experience - in its extraordinary highs and in its dreadful lows - that is the most important aspect of any culture worth its salt.

Let me finish with the following short quotation from  Plotinus (205 - 270 A.D.): "The Human race is poised midway between the Gods and the Beasts."

Somehow, for me, this quotation captures the struggle in humankind to be  more rather than less.

* This theory or model of the evolution of the human brain was proposed was the American physician and neuroscientist,  Paul D. McClean. (See Here and Here )  This model of the evolution of the brain is very useful in psychiatry and psychothery as it lends itself well to a holistic philosophical psychology of the mind or to a humane theory of the mind.